Mechanics

Odyssey hands you four things to spend, and every system in the game is one of them asking for payment. Adrenaline refills in the middle of a fight. Ability points are spent once and stay spent. Materials and drachmae can be farmed, slowly. Story choices cannot be taken back at all.

So the sections below run from the cheapest currency to the most permanent one. If you are stuck on something specific, jump to the currency you are short of. The reason to read it this way rather than as a list of abilities is that a skill's worth is decided by what it costs and what it turns on, not by where it sits on somebody's ranking.

Adrenaline: the meter you refill every fight

There is no block button in Odyssey. The defensive game is dodge and parry, and both of them feed the bar you spend on abilities. Dodge is a sidestep on Square or X, and holding it rolls instead; a perfect dodge slows time and opens an attack window. Parry is L1 and R1 together on PlayStation, or RB and LB on Xbox, timed to the small white flash that precedes an enemy swing.

Read the indicator before you commit. A white indicator means the attack can be parried or dodged. A red one is unblockable and can only be dodged. Special attacks have to be unlocked in the Skills tab first, then fire on L1 and R2, or LB and RT. Our combat guide covers the inputs in full, and several engravings exist purely to fill this bar faster, including adrenaline on each hit, on a critical strike, on a headshot kill and on an assassination.

What a full bar is actually worth

This is the real answer to which skills are best: the ones that repay a whole bar. The table below pulls the payoff and the right target for each, which is the thing the ranked lists never state.

Bull Rush and Spartan Kick are the two you already have, which makes the honest answer to "best early skills" less exciting than the listicles: use the ones you started with, because both solve a problem that raw damage does not. Everything else is covered on our stealth guide.

When not to spend it

In Conquest Battles, abilities are at their most effective fully charged and killing common soldiers is close to futile. The meter at the top of the screen barely moves for rank and file. Hold your charged abilities for Captains, and above all for the enemy hero, who is the single highest-priority target on the field. Spending a full bar on a line of spearmen is the most common way to lose a battle you were winning.

Ability points: the currency you spend once

Points come from levelling and from tombs, and skills sit behind tiers that unlock at set levels. Beast Master is the clearest worked example we have: it is a Tier 3 skill in the Hunter tree and it does not become available until level 10, no matter how many points you are sitting on.

The skills that turn on a whole activity

Most skills add a percentage. A handful unlock something you simply cannot do otherwise, and those are worth buying before anything that only adds damage.

Ikaros deserves the emphasis. It is the same button, the up direction on the D-pad, in three completely different activities: marking guards before you infiltrate, tracking an animal you are hunting, and finding the region leader in a city too big to search. Anything that improves it improves all three.

Picking a tree

Warrior fights with swords, daggers and heavy blades. Hunter is stealth and range, built around the bow. Assassin uses short blades and the hidden blade and leaps from ledges for the killing blow. Pick the one that suits you, but keep some practice in all three, because Odyssey regularly puts you in a situation that punishes a pure build. For actual builds rather than tree choice, see our builds guide.

Materials and drachmae: the currency you farm

Almost all of this ends up in one place, which is the Adrestia. The ship is the biggest single sink in the game, and the reason it is worth costing out is that the numbers are steep enough to plan around. Below, SL is Soft Leather, IM is Iron Metal and OW is Olive Wood.

Three upgrades share the same worst-case price of 11 Ancient Tablets and 14,740 drachmae: Ram Tier 6, Hull Tier 6 and Crew Armor Tier 3. Since there are 46 tablets in total across 21 regions, you cannot max everything, and the tablets are the binding constraint rather than the money. Every location is listed on our ship upgrades guide.

Where each input actually comes from

The costs above and the farming routes live on different pages, so here they are side by side. Iron Metal is the easiest: dismantle any weapon, sink ships, or sweep caves where it is abundant. Obsidian Glass comes from blacksmiths, fort and nation chests, war supplies looted before you burn them, and enemy leaders, though Conquest Battles are probably the best source of all. Precious Gems come from bounties and mercenary kills, and from dismantling gear, but only Epic quality or better produces them. Olive Wood comes from dismantling weapons and bows and from bushes while exploring, though sinking boats and collecting the wood is faster. Soft Leather is the one you cannot shortcut: ships give almost none, so you have to hunt, and deer are the best source.

That last one connects two systems most people treat separately. The hunting guide is effectively the supply line for every Soft Leather row in the table above, and leather from almost any animal also sells at blacksmiths and market vendors for drachmae. For the money side, our money farming guide names five streams: fort loops, treasure and nation chests, bulletin board bounties, sinking higher-level ships, and dismantling gear, which it calls the most efficient of the lot. The one caveat is that legendary gear cannot be sold. Material sources are broken out further in our materials farming guide.

What an upgraded ship lets you do

There are two ways to damage a ship: ram it, or use your archers and javelin throwers. Ramming hurts you as well as them. Archers deal steady damage, and holding the trigger on javelins increases it. The move worth practising is cleaving: hit a ship dead centre and it splits in two, which restores your health and pays extra rewards. Brace when something is about to ram you, never sit in an enemy's firing angle, and use boost to drift into a better one. To board, immobilise the ship first, then kill the crew one at a time, dodging anyone glowing red, and open the treasure chests before you leave.

The hull line is the one with a hidden payoff. You start with one lieutenant slot and there are four in the game, and the extra slots come from hull tiers: Tier 2 gives you two, Tier 3 gives three, Tier 4 gives four. That makes the hull the upgrade to prioritise even before the damage lines. Recruit lieutenants by completing side quests for NPCs or by knocking someone out with L3, pressing L3 again to send them to the ship and then paying them, and use Ikaros to preview the bonuses first. Our naval combat guide and best lieutenants page go further.

Drachmae sinks worth paying for

Mounts are bought from blacksmiths and are the difference between playing Odyssey and walking across it. Four rare horses cost 2,000 drachmae each: the Traveler's Horse in Kirrha, Phokis, the Brown Horse at Myson Cave in Malis, the Pale Horse in Chora of Delphi, and the Racing Horse in Salamis. The Unicorn is 6,400 in Kirrha and Fangs is 6,400 in Athens. The Epic Unicorn Skin is never listed for sale, and the only way to force it out is to keep buying skins, because every purchase retires that skin from all blacksmiths and rotates the next one in. To call your horse, tap down on the D-pad once, which is a different input from the whistle people confuse it with. Our mounts guide has the rest.

Choices: the currency with no refund

No decision in Odyssey ever blocks story progress, which is why it is easy to treat them as flavour. Some are. Six of them are not: they are the difference between the nine endings and the one where your whole family is alive at the table.

The dialogue that actually turns Deimos in Doing Time is worth writing down: "It was the prophecy", "The prophecy said you'd doom Sparta", "You have no idea what happened on that mountain", and "Our mother searched for you". The full chapter log is on our choices and consequences guide, and the compact recipe is on our endings guide.

The detours that cost an evening rather than a resource

Three systems sit outside the four currencies. They cost time and nothing else, and each pays a trophy.

The Goddesses' Hunt

Pick this up from Daphnae at the Temple of Artemis in Phokis. There are eight legendary animals, each one of a kind and gone for good once killed. The first is always the Kalydonian Boar at level 20, west of the temple; after that you choose your own order. The rest run the Nemean Lion at 23 in the Sinkholes of Herakles, the Hind of Keryneia at 25 in the marshes of Euboea, the Kretan Bull at 33 in the Fertile Battleground on Messara, the Lykaon Wolf at 36 on the Dioskouroi Peninsula in Lakonia, Kallisto the Bear at 37 in the Golden Fields of Arkadia, the Erymanthian Boar at 38 in the Erymanthos Foothills in Elis, and the Krokottas Hyena at 39 south of Skandeia Bay on Kythera.

Return to Daphnae after each kill for legendary weapons, ammunition, armor, XP and resources. The last five animals hand over the Master's Artemis set piece by piece, torso through to hood, so this is a full legendary armor set as well as a trophy.

Lore of the Sphinx

This one has real prerequisites. Complete the side quests A Family's Legacy in Thera and Awaken the Myth in Boeotia, then find Atlanta. It becomes available in Sequence 7, right after the story quest United Front. The Sphinx does not fight you: it asks three riddles drawn at random, and the set rerolls every time you fail, so there is no fixed answer sheet to memorise in order. After answering you touch the stones in the same order you gave your answers. All twelve riddles and their one-word answers are on our Sphinx riddles guide.

Taming a companion

With Beast Master bought, you can tame any wild animal you are able to knock out first, wolves and lions and bears included. The limits are worth knowing before you invest: you can only have one companion at a time and must un-tame the current one to swap, companions are not permanent and will die in a fight, and pack leaders, alpha animals and legendary or elite beasts can never be tamed at all. Those last ones exist to be hunted for materials instead, which is why the hunting and taming systems point at the same animals for opposite reasons. A companion is at its most useful against groups and against mercenaries who bring pets of their own.

If you are short on something

Short on damage in a fight you keep losing: it is usually an adrenaline problem, not a gear problem. Check whether you are parrying the white flashes rather than rolling away from them. Short on ability points: clear tombs, which pay one apiece, and check whether the skill you want is even unlocked at your tier yet. Short on drachmae or materials: loop two or three forts, dismantle everything that is not legendary, and hunt deer if it is specifically Soft Leather you need. Short on time before the ending: the six choices in the table above are the only ones that matter, and the first of them is in Chapter 2.